Water Is Not a Luxury Good. It Is a Human Right.

Snipe we must at terrible journalism at a perilous time, but when folks do the craft well, even though what they tell us is infuriating, we should stand up and cheer. Today's huzzahs go to the crew at USA Today, who have taken, yes, a deep dive into the sorry state of this country's water supply. Water is something of an obsession here at the shebeen. Most of the attention over the past couple of years has been focused on the atrocity committed against the people of Flint in Michigan. But the USATinvestigation shows that the problems with the country's drinking water know no racial, demographic, or geographic distinctions.

Consider, for example, a small town in Texas:

It came in city water, delivered to his family's tap through pipes nearly a century old. For almost a year, the little boy bathed in lead-tainted water and ate food cooked in it. As he grew into a toddler—when he should have been learning to talk—he drank tap water containing a toxin known to ravage a child's developing brain. Adam's parents didn't know about the danger until this fall. Officials at City Hall knew long before then, according to local and state records. So did state and federal government regulators who are paid to make sure drinking water in Texas and across the nation is clean. Ranger and Texas officials were aware of a citywide lead problem for two years—one the city still hasn't fixed and one the Waltons first learned about in a September letter to residents. The city and state even knew, from recent tests, that water in the Walton family's cramped, one-bedroom rental house near the railroad tracks was carrying sky-high levels of lead. Destiny and John Walton got their first inkling of a problem when blood tests in June detected high levels of lead in their son's growing body. They first learned that their tap water contained lead—about 28 times the federal limit—when a USA TODAY Network reporter told them in early November.

They all know. The local politicians know. The state politicians know. The national politicians know. It's all another benefit brought to us by the deregulated new economy. (This is what the new nominee for Secretary of Energy, Rick Perry, calls creating a "good business climate." Honest. That's what he says.) It turns out that utility companies that serve less than 1,000 customers don't have to treat their water for lead content until lead is discovered. Even then, federal and state regulators rarely bother to take any action. As a result, as the USAT crew discovered that:

About 100,000 people get their drinking water from utilities that discovered high lead but failed to treat the water to remove it. Dozens of utilities took more than a year to formulate a treatment plan and even longer to begin treatment.

Some 4 million Americans get water from small operators who skipped required tests or did not conduct the tests properly, violating a cornerstone of federal safe drinking water laws. The testing is required because, without it, utilities, regulators and people drinking the water can't know if it's safe. In more than 2,000 communities, lead tests were skipped more than once. Hundreds repeatedly failed to properly test for five or more years.

About 850 small water utilities with a documented history of lead contamination—places where state and federal regulators are supposed to pay extra attention—have failed to properly test for lead at least once since 2010.

When annoying liberals talk about environmental justice, this is exactly what they're pestering us all about.

Officials in West Virginia, for example, labeled more than a dozen systems "orphans" because they didn't have owners or operators. Enforcement efforts for those utilities amounted to little more than a continuous stream of warning letters as utilities failed to test year after year. All the while, residents continued drinking untested—and potentially contaminated—water. "At the end of the day, it creates two universes of people," said water expert Yanna Lambrinidou, an affiliate faculty member at Virginia Tech. "One is the universe of people who are somewhat protected from lead. ... Then we have those people served by small water systems, who are treated by the regulations as second-class citizens." All of this endangers millions of people across the country, mostly in remote and rural communities. Utilities like East Mooringsport Water, serving part of a bayou town of about 800 people, where drinking water went untested for more than five years. Or Coal Mountain, W.Va., a remote 118-person outpost where a retired coal miner pours bleach into untested water at the system's wellhead in hope of keeping it clean. Or Orange Center School outside Fresno, Calif., where for more than a decade regulators let about 320 grade-school kids drink water that had tested high for lead.

This is, as Bernie Sanders repeatedly reminds us, the wealthiest country in the world. Its citizens deserve clean drinking water. Water is not a luxury good, no matter how many corporations believe it should be. Water is not more necessary and precious to rich people than it is to poor people. Water is 70 percent of all human beings. The brain and heart of every human being is 73 percent water. Water is that from which we all came, as Melville says at the beginning of Moby-Dick:

Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region.

Everybody knows this, literally in their blood. But, hey, in the small places, some things just can slip your mind.

In West Texas, at Klondike Independent School District, water safety is handled by Superintendent Steve McLaren, whose first job is running a one-building school system serving 260 students. He wears many hats in the district amid cotton fields; he's been known to drive a school bus from time to time. McLaren acknowledged he skipped required testing for lead and copper in fall 2014 because "some things just slip by." When Klondike did test last year, it found excessive lead in both rounds of testing. Generally, the bar for running tiny water systems is low. Certification for hands-on operators varies by state and typically involves passing an exam and getting ongoing continuing education credits. Some states require licensing but with varying qualifications. Minimum requirements in Texas, for instance, are a high school diploma or GED and a training course in basic water operations. No experience necessary. "You might have to get more training to run a hot dog stand than a small water system," said Paul Schwartz with the Campaign for Lead Free Water, a group of people and organizations working to get lead out of drinking water.

Christamighty.

So much of the modern conservative creed is contained in this situation. Deregulation is good for people. Government is best at the local level. Except that deregulation leads to children with poisons in their brains, and government at the local level is wholly inadequate to address the problem, or it doesn't have the political will to address the problem, or both.

And I find it necessary to note at this point that Eastland County, where Ranger, Texas, is located, and where little Adam Walton is struggling against the lead in his body, voted for a presidential candidate who pledged to eliminate entirely the Environmental Agency, and who already picked a guy to head that department named Scott Pruitt.

As The American Prospect points out, Pruitt never has met an environmental regulation over which he couldn't sue someone. This, naturally, includes any regulation aimed at protecting the water supply.

One of the clearest signals Trump has sent is his intention to scrap the Clean Water Rule, a fight Pruitt has also championed. Finalized last year, the rule expands federal protections for some 20 million acres of lakes, wetlands, and streams—drinking water sources for 117 million Americans. Unlike other parts of Trump's environmental agenda, scrapping the rule is a core Republican objective. In the 18 months since the rule was finalized, more than a dozen GOP governors have sued to stop its enforcement, along with two oil companies. The Clean Water Rule is designed to help prevent crises like the toxic algae bloom in Lake Erie that left half a million Toledo residents without safe drinking water in 2014. Caused in part by agricultural runoff into wetlands and streams emptying into Lake Erie, cyanobacteria produced by the algae has been linked to diarrhea, dizziness, vomiting, and liver damage. And Ohio is not alone. Similar outbreaks have threatened water supplies in more than 20 states this past summer—a significant increase over previous years. Without a robust Clean Water Rule, experts say, one in three Americans could risk exposure to these and similar contaminants.

Eastland County voted for Donald Trump. He won 86 percent of the vote.

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